ˈrəst(ɪd) /ˈlaNGɡwij/
ˈrəst(ɪd) /ˈlaNGɡwij/
Meaning breaks slowly. It doesn’t shatter—it buckles. Language falters. Surfaces resist. Systems built to clarify begin to collapse under their own weight. In that erosion, something else begins to emerge. But new meaning isn’t guaranteed. It drags. It leaks. The structures meant to contain it—language, logic, knowledge, experience, insight, authority—begin to fray. Something appears, but doesn’t quite resolve. You think you recognize it. You’re not sure.
Occupying that blur—between what’s meant and what’s received, between structure and breakdown—requires time. It refuses immediacy.
The paintings are built from rust and Rust-Oleum, two materials in deliberate conflict between nature and artifice. Rust grows, shifts, and records the slow, natural drift of time. Rust-Oleum exists to halt that process—to fix the surface, to harden and preserve, to deny change. When laid against each other, they behave like competing systems: one organic and emergent, the other a manufactured promise of permanence. Their interaction produces surfaces where meaning corrodes, resurfaces, or refuses to settle. The materials themselves stage the same tension the language inhabits: the push and pull between erosion and control, between what forms naturally and what is forced to hold still.
Rusted Words began with a disconnect—public figures fumbling the language written for them. Scripts designed to sound decisive came out garbled, misread. I was struck by the failure—not just of speech, but of performance, of legibility, of meaning trying and failing to hold itself together. So I started sounding it out. Like the VTech Talking Whiz Kid Plus—a bulky, gray educational laptop from the early ’90s that plagued my childhood with the promise of fun but delivered only friction—I began helping, in a way. Phonetics in place of fluency.
The paintings use familiar phrases rendered phonetically--cheep simbəlizəm, y(our), a kwī-ət lāf. The goal isn’t to obscure language, but to slow it down. What feels familiar asks for a second reading. Letters become objects. Reading becomes a kind of listening.
The materials—Rust-Oleum and iron-based emulsion—carry their own logic. They fight. One resists time, sealing the surface in a synthetic skin. The other embraces it, oxidizing, bleeding, corroding across weeks and months. The result is a shifting field where material histories overwrite textual ones.
Rusted Words treats language as something alive and susceptible—to error, to decay, to reinterpretation. These works inhabit the space between what the conditions and context of words are positioned to mean and what they manage to become. In that tension—between misreading and meaning, between corrosion and control—new forms of understanding surface into view before slipping back into uncertainty.
Meaning breaks slowly. It doesn’t shatter—it buckles. Language falters. Surfaces resist. Systems built to clarify begin to collapse under their own weight. In that erosion, something else begins to emerge. But new meaning isn’t guaranteed. It drags. It leaks. The structures meant to contain it—language, logic, knowledge, experience, insight, authority—begin to fray. Something appears, but doesn’t quite resolve. You think you recognize it. You’re not sure.
Occupying that blur—between what’s meant and what’s received, between structure and breakdown—requires time. It refuses immediacy.
The paintings are built from rust and Rust-Oleum, two materials in deliberate conflict between nature and artifice. Rust grows, shifts, and records the slow, natural drift of time. Rust-Oleum exists to halt that process—to fix the surface, to harden and preserve, to deny change. When laid against each other, they behave like competing systems: one organic and emergent, the other a manufactured promise of permanence. Their interaction produces surfaces where meaning corrodes, resurfaces, or refuses to settle. The materials themselves stage the same tension the language inhabits: the push and pull between erosion and control, between what forms naturally and what is forced to hold still.
Rusted Words began with a disconnect—public figures fumbling the language written for them. Scripts designed to sound decisive came out garbled, misread. I was struck by the failure—not just of speech, but of performance, of legibility, of meaning trying and failing to hold itself together. So I started sounding it out. Like the VTech Talking Whiz Kid Plus—a bulky, gray educational laptop from the early ’90s that plagued my childhood with the promise of fun but delivered only friction—I began helping, in a way. Phonetics in place of fluency.
The paintings use familiar phrases rendered phonetically--cheep simbəlizəm, y(our), a kwī-ət lāf. The goal isn’t to obscure language, but to slow it down. What feels familiar asks for a second reading. Letters become objects. Reading becomes a kind of listening.
The materials—Rust-Oleum and iron-based emulsion—carry their own logic. They fight. One resists time, sealing the surface in a synthetic skin. The other embraces it, oxidizing, bleeding, corroding across weeks and months. The result is a shifting field where material histories overwrite textual ones.
Rusted Words treats language as something alive and susceptible—to error, to decay, to reinterpretation. These works inhabit the space between what the conditions and context of words are positioned to mean and what they manage to become. In that tension—between misreading and meaning, between corrosion and control—new forms of understanding surface into view before slipping back into uncertainty.
